Probably everyone will have a different answer to this question, but Stephen Duff's is Adam Elsheimer's 'Flight into Egypt',  a painting in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

Painted about 1609, the year before his death, it is a very dark painting - it's a night scene - but it is achingly beautiful, and it is also a remarkable work of art - the first accurate representation of the night sky in the whole of European painting.

A German artist, Elsheimer spent most of his short career - he died at the age of only 32 - in Italy.

Two artists developed radically opposing approaches to the emotive power of landscape painting in Britain in the early 19th Century. One was dramatic, bombastic and fiery, intending to provoke powerful emotions and elevated thoughts. The other was spiritual, heartfelt and closely observed, asking the viewer to react to an intense, inward and personal approach to nature.

These two artists were JMW Turner and John Constable, the leading British artists of their day. Not only did they approach painting in different ways but their lives were opposites as well. This talk will explore their different approaches and their famous, bitter rivalry.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was one of the great figures of the late nineteenth century: a poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, wit and subversive thinker.

He lived a life crowded with incident, spanning great success and humiliating failure. This talk charts a way through his life and achievement by examining, and contextualizing, half a dozen of his celebrated epigrams, from ‘Every day I find it harder and harder to live up to my blue china’ to ‘I am fighting a battle to the death with my wallpaper: one of us will have to go.’ 

Before The Nutcracker became everybody's favourite Christmas ballet, it was staged in Tsarist Russia. 

With reference to the glorious history of the Imperial Ballet company in St. Petersburg, this talk discusses how Tchaikovsky came to write his magical score and Petipa created its choreography, and also tells the story of the dancers who created the leading roles.  

It also explores Tchaikovsky's role in transforming classical ballet into the vibrant art form it is today

This is a talk about booze and intoxication in art.

Since the early Romans and Greeks, alcohol has been an important subject for artists. We examine the way drink and drinking are depicted, the social messages portrayed, the happy and unhappy consequences, and how alcohol affected the lives of many artists, their families and friends

William Blake had visions, talked to his dead brother, and invented a mythology that few could understand. Yet for all that he was a deeply human person, with attributes and flaws, and living in lowly circumstances and fighting authority much of the time. He was political, and sided with the revolutions in both France and America. Moreover, this radical man would be bemused by his poem ‘And did those feet’ being sung as a kind of national anthem today. He believed that heaven was overrated and the word of God too often presented as law-giving dogma; while hell was a place free from rules and where emotions and personalities could be expressed.

A personal account by the landscape painter and art historian, Lydia Bauman, of her journey through New Mexico in search of the iconic motifs painted by American painter Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986).

Hear about her own adventures and misadventures, insights gained into the legendary painter's life and work and see how New Mexico's magnificent landscape inspired new directions in her own mixed media paintings which led to a major exhibition at the Mall Galleries in 2019

The most significant proof of the power of art is the fact that some people feel the need to destroy it.

Attacks and acts of destruction have gone on for as long as art has existed, from the iconoclastic riots of the Protestant Reformation to climate protesters’ defilement of historical paintings in national museums. This talk will explore artworks that have survived despite attacks, the practice of using destructive strategies to create art.

Some of the finest work of modern British art was produced during the second world war. Many women were amongst the artists officially commissioned to record the Blitz and travel through Europe to record its devastation first-hand. 

One, Doris Zinkeisen, was the first civilian to arrive at Belsen after its liberation by the Allies. They also painted land girls back home, the women in factories, in the ATS + the Red Cross, all stepping into the breach to keep the country going. 

Magdelen Evans will introduce you to some new names based on her interviews with several of the self-effacing but very talented people who found their paintings shown at the National Gallery, while all its other masterpieces were hidden away in the slate mines of Snowdonia.

While Myra Hess’s morale boosting concerts took place there throughout the war, the Recording Britain and War Artists Advisory Committee schemes meant that artists were guaranteed employment, and our national collections would inherit work of great historical and propaganda interest, much of which is not often on display.